In presidential politics, Calvin Coolidge is unique in choosing not to run. Any fool knows that a sitting President, if he wants it, can have his party's nomination for a second term. These truths are self-evident, and all evidence shows that Lyndon Johnson is not only sitting but running. Any incumbent President can make his will felt upon his party's state and city political structures, and Mr. Johnson is exceptionally adept at this kind of manipulation.
Take the traditional largesse in the rivers and harbors bill. The doubtless apocryphal story of Mr.

Ghetto and Garrison
To understand the Negro city problem, you have to realize how most big American cities are now developing. There is the downtown business-amusement area, generally close to the factory area. This is surrounded by a noose of slums increasingly Negro ghettoes. And beyond that are the white garrison suburbs; segregated, of course.
To get downtown, the white commuters have to go through, or over, or under, the ghetto which, of course, they don't see.

There are 14 million men in the United States between the ages of 19 and 26 who are theoretically eligible for military service. How many of them actually are "available" to meet the escalating draft calls (46,000 men in October, the highest since Korea) is a matter of shifting definition. Over the past year the Defense Department has announced a number of piecemeal changes in standards which have increased both the manpower pool and the anxiety of men who have deferments.
Since 1958 many men have been rejected on mental grounds who would have been found acceptable earlier.

“New York City needs, and must have, a change. It must change completely in all of its institutions from top to bottom.”—CANDIDATE JOHN LINDSAY, a week before his election as mayor.
Lindsay is often called “the Republican Kennedy.” There is some resemblance. Like the late President, he is forever tilting with a lethargic bureaucracy, trying to impart to it some of his own dash and sense of urgency. Kennedy tried, but soon abandoned, the experiment of sitting in on a State Department staff meeting and startling middle-echelon officials by telephoning them to ask their opinions.

DespairBy Vladimir Nabokov
(Putnam, $5)
Nabokov, describing the work of "V. Sirin" (his pseudonym as a Russian emigre novelist) in Conclusive Evidence, says, "the real life of his books flowed in his figures of speech," and "his best works are those in which he condemns his people to the solitary confinement of their souls." Despair, the sixth of the nine novels Nabokov wrote in Russian, is neatly bracketed by these remarks. He wrote it in 1932, and translated it into English in 1936.

Because he is using his powers as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to pressure President Johnson into a change of foreign policy, the name of Senator J. William Fulbright was dropped with a clang from the White House social list for six months, from last September until this March, when President Johnson apparently decided that wasn’t the way to influence an Arkansan. Fulbright’s response to the cease-fire took the form of three Christian A.

Five of the most interesting men in American public life have spoken here recently. We watched them, pondered them, and jotted down notes about them, mostly under blinding TV lights. Here they are.
Fulbright. Relaxed, low-keyed, tanned face. Wears Ben Franklin glasses; peers over them. Affable. Oxford. Has aristocratic loathing for demagogues, many of whom are colleagues. I remember meeting him outside the Senate Caucus Room years back when he first saw McCarthy in action. Voice shook. State of shock.

Robert Kennedy is on to something. He hovers over it like a pig in the Perigord sniffing a truffle. It is just below the surface; he can't quite see it; he doesn't know its size or shape or worth or even what it's called. He only knows it's there, and he is going to get it.
Where does he look? Among the grape-pickers on strike in central California, in Cloth Market Square in Cracow, on the Ole Miss campus, in a Senate hearing room. And always with the same single-minded, almost frightening intensity.